BECOMING SUPRA

Chapter 12.1: Yinka

Early one morning, two years and forty-five days ago, Yinka went to the locker rooms to shower and change. During various stages of undress, photographs were clicked of her and circulated to all at school. The last person to know of this indiscretion was Yinka herself.

Yinka was in the library when Ms. Ries took her aside.

"Yinka ... Dean Schneider and Principal Cheyo have been notified. Don't you worry, strict action will take place."

"About what?" asked Yinka.

"About the pictures that are being circulated."

"What pictures?" asked Yinka.

"There were pictures of you ... taken in the locker room today."

"I don't quite understand ...."

"Yinka, someone took pictures while you were getting dressed and they've circulated it all around school today."

Yinka heard the words and folded into herself, her eyes brimming with dread.

She slowly held out her hand and Ms. Reis handed her the phone with the evidence. Yinka swiped through, painstakingly studying her naked image.

Yinka was standing stark naked, lifting one leg into a panty hole. The harsh top-light of the locker room casting shadows, making her breasts look saggy and her barely visible cellulite look like cratered flesh. She could distinctly see her stretch marks, little white snakes rising from her hips. Her face looked serene, almost beautiful but no one was going to look at what they'd already seen before. Yinka took in every wretched detail.

Her worst nightmare had come to pass.

She was the heaviest girl in school, now everybody had seen her naked. She could do nothing to undo it. Nothing. She felt exposed, humiliated.

Yinka's father had completed an eleven-hour journey from Lagos to Florida, when Dean Schneider finally got through to him. He immediately cancelled all his meetings and took the next connection out to meet his daughter.

The girl who clicked and circulated the photographs cried when they told her she was being expelled. Yinka, on the other hand, still had not shed a tear.

Dean Schneider sat in front of Yinka's father assuring him that this kind of behavior is not tolerated by the school and the girls who perpetrated this act have already been dismissed. She also added that if it were Yinka's decision to leave, the school would cooperate in all manners to make the move as convenient as possible. Though she hoped that wouldn't be the case.

Yinka sat listening, expressionless, vacant. Only those as discerning as parents could tell what she was truly experiencing.

"I'll stay," said Yinka.

When Yinka's aunt, Subin found out about the incident, she called Yinka and said, if you stay, at least you will be certain that it will not happen again. Was it better to live through one humiliation than to constantly fear the possibility of living it twice over? She decided it was.

Every time Yinka replayed the indignity, the blackbirds sitting on her heart dug their talons deep. Yinka wanted to rid herself of the blackbirds, she wanted to eradicate them once and for all.

She opened the first door, then the second, her body floated up readily. She shut her eyes. She heard noises fluttering inside: rasping, cackling, crying. She wished she could sing them out to freedom, sing them out note by note.

With patience she overwrote habitual thought patterns, tackling and deflecting the incessant replay of her mortification.

Gradually, she slipped into a theta state.

A blackbird rose up and flew out through the opaque glass. Her spine sprung a measure straighter, a degree of lightness seeped into her.